Today's Stichomancy for Donald Rumsfeld

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard:

of it was he came to life again.

For three days did I doctor that man, and really I believe that if at
any time during those days I had relaxed my attentions even for a couple
of hours, he would have slipped through my fingers, for at this business
Klaus and the Kaffirs were no good at all. But I pulled him round, and
on the third morning he came to his senses. For a long while he stared
at me, for I had laid him in the mouth of the cave, where the light was
good, although the overhanging rocks protected him from the sun. Then
he said:

"Allemachte! you remind me of someone, young man. I know. It is of
that damned English boy who beat me at the goose shooting, and made me

yet the two forms--the old and the new--would not be identically the same;
for both would almost certainly inherit different characters from their
distinct progenitors. For instance, it is just possible, if our
fantail-pigeons were all destroyed, that fanciers, by striving during long
ages for the same object, might make a new breed hardly distinguishable
from our present fantail; but if the parent rock-pigeon were also
destroyed, and in nature we have every reason to believe that the
parent-form will generally be supplanted and exterminated by its improved
offspring, it is quite incredible that a fantail, identical with the
existing breed, could be raised from any other species of pigeon, or even
from the other well-established races of the domestic pigeon, for the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy:

The attendant came up.

'Do you want some wood chopped? Let me have the axe.'

Sergius yielded up the axe and entered the cell. She was lying
there asleep. He looked at her with horror, and passed on beyond
the partition, where he took down the peasant clothes and put
them on. Then he seized a pair of scissors, cut off his long
hair, and went out along the path down the hill to the river,
where he had not been for more than three years.

A road ran beside the river and he went along it and walked till
noon. Then he went into a field of rye and lay down there.
Towards evening he approached a village, but without entering it

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: